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Spreadtrum Stands and Delivers

This is one very direct play on the Chinese smartphone market.

Today was a very confusing day for investors who lean on smartphone and tablet technologies.

The overall market is swooning on jobs data (not to be confused with Jobs data, which look encouraging), and a disappointing report by Marvell Technology Group(Nasdaq: MRVL) put some more stones on the mobile market's burden. But radio-chip specialist Spreadtrum Communicaitons(Nasdaq: SPRD) looks as rosy as can be, rising briefly to all-time highs and 12.1% gains on a terrific fourth-quarter report.

Of course, the comparison to Marvell is a little unfair. Marvell is only just looking to move downstream into cheaper handsets, and Spreadtrum is a giant in the TD-SCDMA chips used in China.

That's the market environment into which Marvell, Qualcomm(Nasdaq: QCOM), Texas Instruments(NYSE: TXN), and other American chip wranglers are dying to make inroads. The promise of the world's largest consumer market overrides price-war fears. Given the presence of entrenched market leaders Spreadtrum and Realtek, that's going to be a tough road for even the biggest and richest of the Westerners.

If you want to invest in Chinese consumerism, Spreadtrum would be as good a place as any to start. Just be mindful of the stock's nosebleed valuation, driven by 275% gains over the last year. You're not the first investor to see gold in them thar Himalayas!